About Eidersson GjallhundrPROPHETS OF THE KALISTRADE RIVAL: Vaultminder Eidersson Gjallhundr
Vaultmaster Eidersson has no clan, but his human associates at the temple of Abadar are unaware of his disgraceful exit from dwarven society, nor that his professed last name of Gjallhundr is something he made up, a play on words from how he concealed his shorn locks with strands of golden hair hanging from a gold-plated skullcap. Years later, his hair has grown middling length again, and he wears it in two long locks that have been dipped in molten gold (bespelled first to survive the intense heat…) and appear to be two golden ‘horns’ that fit snug against his scalp and trail back along his skull around his ears to end near his shoulders. His beard is similarly forked and gilded, also faintly resembling the horns of a ram, descending from his cheeks and curling gently outwards, retaining just barely enough flexibility, due to the softness of the pure metal, that he can force them into more convenient position with effort. He serves the Vault well, maintaining an elaborate system of traps and defensive devices (and, occasionally, spells), to protect the monies secured within the various church banks that make use of his services. While he maintains both skill and spells to locate the presence of security measures that may have gone awry, or been the product of a Vaultsman who has passed on unexpectedly, and taken the proper safe procedures to the grave with him, he does not open traps himself. Indeed, if anyone brings up his well-known shorn appearance of his acolyte years, he will begrudgingly confess that his hair was burned off dabbling with a trap beyond his skills to disarm (a bald-faced lie, so to speak, but a plausible one). Instead, he leaves such matters to his ‘gilded men,’ a euphemism he uses for those who have sworn to defend the Vault not merely in this life, but beyond it. These skeletons normally macabre appearance is somewhat mitigated, or perhaps made even more macabre, by a soft brushing of gold leaf upon their bones (thinly layered over a coating of gold paint), making them appear to be skeletons composed of pure gold. Clad in immaculate white robes, with polished masks, hoods pulled up and sleeves clinched to completely obscure their appearance, they can be mistaken for unspeaking acolytes, to the distant viewer. Even then, Eidersson has learned which temples are accommodating of such an entourage, and which are, as he thinks of them, backwards and closed-minded, and keeps a journal of where to leave the entourage when entering an area where their presence would cause him unreasonable difficulty with the locals. (Even in the most high-minded communities, he has found that there always seems to be some down-on-his-luck and morally flexible farmer willing to take some coin to store a half-dozen inert figures in his root cellar for a week, although he has found more creative solutions, such as ordering his minions to walk to the bottom of a lake and await his return, which seemed terribly clever until he realized that he would need to prepare a water breathing spell to get them back...) Eidersson loathes the Kalistocracy, having attempted in his youth to engage in a little enlightened self-interest by making a deal with a Prophet to fabulously enrich the pair of them at the expense of his dwarven family, intending to punish parents and siblings he utterly despised and set himself up in the Kalistocracy with a nice starting stake, well ahead of the game, and no longer chained to dwarvish tradition, which he found utterly stifling. (His impending arranged marriage to a woman he found tiresome certainly didn’t help matters.) The Kalistocrat he had made his devil’s deal with turned out to be one of those insufferably proper sorts, who promptly reported the back-door dealings to his father, and hence his being shaved and tossed out the door with the clothes on his back, serving to instill in him a powerful dislike of the Kalistocracy, who, obviously, are to blame for everything that went wrong in his life, and for why he doesn’t have a nice villa on Lake Encartha and a dozen servants yet. He has a copy of the Prophecies of the Kalistrade, which he still admires, and resents, alternately (the book has required magical repair, more than once, due to the intensity of this love-hate relationship), and he sometimes practices the dietary restrictions of the Kalistrade, and sometimes egregiously violates it, such that he has a bit of a paunch from these binges of devouring all of the proscribed food he can. He is less concerned with the sexual prohibitions, as his own interests in such matters are long repressed, and would likely have been proscribed in any event. His greatest joy is to locate a Prophet working outside of Druma, and arrange for them to be ‘discovered’ engaging in proscribed behavior, the more shockingly unacceptable, the better. He has spent good coin on cooks who could mask one type of food as another, or prostitutes willing to lie about their age, racial makeup or other qualities, and to seduce would-be Prophets into acts quite clearly against the teachings of the book. In an ideal situation, he would be able to cause such improprieties to be observed by another member of the Kalistocracy, although he has only successfully engineered a single such perfect event so far. Few of his superiors in the Church of Abadar know of his little side-project, and while his immediate superior is one of them, it has been quietly agreed upon that the Kalistocracy’s continued success is not in the best interests of the banking monopolies enjoyed by the Vault, and so, perhaps his little games should be allowed to play out, for now, although the church is prepared to deny everything and throw him to the wolves if he is caught… Boons Those who assist Eidersson in his day job of securing, transporting or even testing the defenses of Abadarite funds can earn his favor. Those who assist him in his ‘hobby’ of arranging scandal and disgrace for Prophets even more so. He is a stingy fellow, however, and would prefer to reward those who assist him with services, such as clerical spells, instead of in material goods. He does know a special technique, a strange confluence of miserliness and divine power, that causes the corrosive properties of his Domain power of acid dart to not affect gold. He can teach this technique to another priest with the same ability, or even to a conjuration specialist wizard, with the arcane equivalent of this ability. *Aqua Regia – Eidersson has learned the Abadarite technique to craft a dilution of alchemical acid that is similarly unable to corrode gold, which the Church uses to test the purity of coins. He is willing to give vials of this solution to allies, although the Church would take a dim view upon him revealing the recipe... |
